In recent years, wireless operators have been experiencing a steadily increasing demand for higher data rates and better quality of service due to the constant growth in the number of active wireless terminals. One significant challenge is how to improve the indoor coverage. Studies show that over 50% of all voice calls and more than 70% of data traffic originate from indoors. Therefore, indoor coverage providing high data rate and quality-of-service (QoS) is a key issue in developing next-generation wireless systems. However, adding macrocell base station (MBS) to meet the growing indoor service demands is very expensive. Instead, femtocells using femtocell access points (FAPs) have been proposed as a new system architecture to tackle this problem.
An FAP is a simple, low-power and low-cost base station installed at a user's premise, e.g., house, office, warehouse, etc., that provides a femtocell for local access to the network by means of some cellular technology (e.g., 2G, 3G). Using femtocells benefits both users and operators. Due to the proximity between the transmitter and receiver, indoor users experience better signal quality and communicate with higher throughput. Moreover, indoor users transmit less power when being in the range of the FAP, resulting in prolonged battery life and reduced interference to the macrocell. When indoor users (e.g., the ones in their own apartments) are connected to an FAP, there are fewer indoor users transmitting in the macrocell and the overall capacity and QoS of the network improves. From the operator's point of view, femtocells can improve spectrum reuse and provide high network capacity and spectral efficiency. In addition, given that FAPs are typically paid for and maintained by the owners, the overall network cost is reduced.
On the other hand, despite these advantages, femtocells bring about multiple new challenges in terms of network architecture, interference management and synchronization. In particular, interference problems between macrocells and femtocells can become a major issue that requires new solutions due to the extra degrees of complexity in comparison with standard cellular networks.
Accordingly, new systems, methods, and media for reducing femtocell interference are provided.